During the big cleanup before the move, I had to take multiple trips to the local landfill. I learned a few things about this.

The big thing I learned is never ever wear sandals to a landfill. I managed to do this twice.

Second, the local landfill was actually in a really beautiful part of town. Well, out of town in a particular beautiful direction, I guess. I’d never had occasion to go that way, but having gone there I felt it was a shame. If we’d stayed, I might have advocated building a house that way. Well, if we’d stayed and there hadn’t been the landfill over that way.

I was expecting there to be a big dumpster or something. I put the trash in there, then some truck puts it in a pit that gets covered up. Actually, we just put it on the ground. Somehow it goes from a ground to the container, then maybe the container to somewhere else. Whatever the case, you’re just putting a bunch of stuff on the ground. That’s… a really weird feeling.

The second trip out there involved dumping our auto-swing. It stopped working sometime back. We felt really bad about throwing away something that was close to useful. But it was in such a shape that I knew thrift stores wouldn’t take it and we didnt want to haul it across the country.

Now, I am not exactly Mr. Environmentalist, but one place (not the only place) where I am sympathetic is the throwing away of almost-good-stuff. I am always trying to repurpose old electronics equipment, for instance. But sometimes you can’t. Mom runs a thrift store for the church and she tells me enough to know that broken electronics, even if useful in other contexts, is never useful to them. Maybe a gadgeteer could fix it, but it’s all part of the disposable societal that hippies and environmentalists and liberals lament and where I don’t honestly disagree at least in the abstract sense.

So imagine my happy surprise when I arrive back with the next load and the swing was gone! Actually, it was in the truck parked next to me. The woman noticed me looking at it and was self-conscious about it. I had simply told her that I’d dropped off the autoswing a half-hour before and I was pleased as punch that someone was going to have a use for it.

She took it the wrong way and said that she would put it back. I told her that no I was very happy. And in fact I went in my car and gave her the mobile hangs that I’d taken off before trashing it. This changed her mood on it somewhat. She was still embarrassed and explained away why she was in a landfill getting stuff. To me, no explanation was necessary. Seriously. I think it’s great if people can find and make use of such stuff. I wish more people would do it.

Even setting aside environmental concerns, a cradle-to-cradle society of stuff seems more culturally nourishing to me than the disposable one we participate in.

Torie Bosch says that you should elope. There was a time in my life where I was much more sympathetic to the viewpoint of “small wedding, save for downpayment on the house.” Much to my surprise, though, I have actually come around to the idea of big weddings, to whatever extent they can be afforded.

Vaccinate.

Maybe all of our fixation on the early years of life is misplaced.

Aeon magazine looks at the science of sleep, and technological efforts to negate the need for as much of it.

Makes sense: Heroes and psychopaths have similar personalities. You know who knows this? Supervillains. They like say it all the time. Superheroes, on the other hand, tell them they’re wrong. Supervillains 1, Superheroes 0.

Will Linux be a solution for small businesses that reject Windows 8? I’m skeptical, but am starting to compile lists of what exactly is preventing me from making the transition. The lists aren’t as long as they used to be. Meanwhile, Microsoft wants control of your preboot.

The Reagan tax cuts may be responsible for as little as 30% of the increase in income inequality. Dave Schuler has some thoughts.

Before we left Estacado, we had to get Clancy’s Camry fixed. She went to the dealership and they quoted $4,000. I called them back and they almost immediately started talking $1,100 (so angry were we, we went somewhere else – and paid less than $800). So the fact that women are overcharged doesn’t surprise me. It’s interesting how it can be mitigated, though.

Buildings made of ships.

In the minds and hearts of rats, and probably humans, empathy and disgust go to war with one another.

Though not the enemy that some have feared, Obama has not entirely been a friend to the oil and gas industries, so it’s a bit ironic how much heavy lifting oil and gas are doing for him, economically.

In case you hadn’t noticed, I am driving across the country with my family. This will be reflected in my posting regularity and commenting participation.

I meant to post about this at the outset, but time got away from me. So I have a plan for a series of posts where I am going to take a picture of every Trumanverse state I cross through. This includes Minnetaria, where I will never be more than a mile or two from the border. When it’s all done, I’ll add links to all the pictures and bump this post up, where it’ll be an index for all of the posts.

A frequent topic of conversation lately over at The League is compensation for organ donors. Sally Satel, a recipient of an uncompensated donation, recently made the case for compensated donation at Slate. This post isn’t about the merits of that particular argument. Rather, it’s about this passage:

Kidneys can be donated by the living. Indeed, roughly half of all donors are friends or loved ones of recipients. To induce more strangers to save a life, compensation could again be provided by a third party and overseen by the government. Because bidding and private buying would not be permitted, available organs would be distributed to the next in line—not just to the wealthy. By providing in-kind rewards—such as a down payment on a house, a contribution to a retirement fund, or lifetime health insurance—the program would not be attractive to desperate people who might otherwise rush to donate on the promise of a large sum of instant cash.

One of the concerns about compensated donorship is that it would end up preying on the poor and desperate. I have my doubts that it would, but it’s a concern sincerely felt. And there are a number of reasons you would want to keep financially desperate people out of the loop, not the least of which is that they’d be more likely to lie on their application so that they would be accepted. Satel’s proposal would indeed sidestep this by forgoing the promise of cash and in favor of things that would be more appealing to middle class folks and less appealing to the hard-up.

As I said, though, this isn’t about compensated donation specifically. Rather, it’s about some of these incentives and why I am less than sure about them.

By virtue of being (until last Friday) a physician trained for rural medicine, Clancy is eligible for all sorts of loan repayment programs. Which, since we’re in the upper five-digits in debt, sounds nice. One problem with this, though, is that the pay in the places that offer these incentives are typically low and by taking a job in a less rural, wealthier place would mean more money with which to pay back the student loans to begin with. You could up the student loan repayment, except for a couple of things.

First, the faster the student loan is repaid, the quicker the doctor is likely to leave. Which sort of becomes self-defeating, in a way. I mean, when the repayment is done, they actually take a hit in pay.

The second is that programs like this encourage weird financial behavior. It would be in the Himmelreich-Truman household’s best interest to pay off the loans as quickly as we can. Wouldn’t it? The bank gets its money and we don’t have to worry about interest payments and everybody is happy. It doesn’t make sense to hold on to the money while owing others… except that under these programs it starts to make sense.

Let’s say that we cut a check right now for the entire balance of the student loan debt. But then, the job she next takes has a loan repayment system. Well, that money is not transferrable into cash. So, in essence, by having made good on our debt, we’d be forgoing future income. Yet if we don’t pay off the debt, or as much as possible, and there is no repayment system in whichever job she takes, then that’s cost us money, too.

Yet if loan repayment were converted into cash, it would become even more apparent that the inducement is insufficient for the money-motivated. And, of course, it would also end up going to those who aren’t in it for the inducement who know just shrug off the student loan repayments that they aren’t getting. And lastly, in the same way that we like actual gifts better than cash at Christmastime, there is something nice about getting something specific. So maybe, as inefficient as it is, loan repayment works as well as the alternative anyway.

At least, until or unless we come up with a system that more genuinely and thoroughly rewards physicians for working in places that physicians don’t generally want to work. That would require an overall that the PPACA debate suggests that we are just not ready for.

The Denver airport is among the more smoker-friendly airports, historically speaking. It’s not quite as great the one in Salt Lake City, but they at least have a few private establishments where they allow people to smoke in piece. No more, though. They’re down to only one, and the signs are that one will be going away in 2018 as soon as the lease expires in 2018.

I understand that we do not want to go back to the days when smokers were rampant and their smoke was nigh-impossible to escape. But seriously, are we reaching the point where room cannot be made in an airport of however many square feet? That it is just too much of an imposition on non-smokers that smokers have a single place rather than a Jamba Juice?

I really do wonder the extent to which it is no longer the second-hand smoke that is required to bother other people to justify a ban, but the notion of being bothered by people smoking. The rubber will hit the road when it comes to ecigarettes and what kind of restrictions we place on them. I made note of the fact that Starbucks is banning them along with regular cigarettes on their property. Brandon Berg made a good point that this may simply be a measure to avoid having to police whether it’s smoke or vapor coming out of the thing that the guy or girl has between her fingers.

Maybe so. At least, that’ll be the rationale that most people rely on. A part of me wonders the extent to which we have really reached the point where smoking, or vaping, is to be considered such shameful behavior that it is to be pushed out of public view altogether regardless of the harm or lack thereof of people around. Which wouldn’t be a completely bad thing (if the ecigarettes take off, I will try not to use them in Lain’s sight), but overlooks rather obvious problems.

Namely, that smokers are going to smoke somewhere unless you go the route of Hawaii or Albuquerque (even there, I’m told that you should simply ask an employee who smells like cigarette smoke and they’ll tell ya). Preventing them from having a lounge in the Denver airport is going to cause a non-trivial number of them to clutter up the security lines re-entering.